Imortant! Special Requirements for Loading of Your Email Contact Lists
On the initial loading of your emails, we require you to send the list to us to load in order to improve our deliverability scores by pre-cleaning your list of bounced addresses, invalid addresses and chronic spam complainers. If you have your list in Outlook you can just use Outlooks’ Export function to create a CSV file you can send to customer service. We’ll clean it and load it for you.
Ongoing uploading of your new contacts:
After the initial load, as long as the list of new users being added is less than 100, you can input it right from the newsletter (see those FAQs!). If your list is 50 or more, then you must send it to us to load for you after we clean it. NOTE: See below for information on which lists are unacceptable (LinkedIn contacts are not acceptable to load) but you can invite them yourself.
DO NOT ADD LINKEDIN 'CONTACTS' or purchased lists, directory lists, etc., directly to your newsletter as these people are frequent complainers. As few as 3 of complaints from one mailing can block sending for everyone. Don't do it.
If you wish to email these lists yourself from your desktop with a personal invitation to subscribe to your newsletter that's up to you. The best way to do that is to simply send the people the Subscribe URL you get from your newsletter by right clicking the “Subscribe” icon next to the social icons. Copy the icon and paste it in the email you send with the hyperlink attached to it. That will let them subscribe and remove any doubt they want it.
Why Can't I Load Outside Lists?
SPAM is a huge problem today and the way it's combated means we all have to be extra cautious about what and how we send email.
The way email works is that a "email delivery vendor" takes a stream of email from our servers and they handle the complex logistics of sending out those emails to many different ISP's like Hotmail, Gmail, your company webserver, etc. They are the ones who receive, store, send and manage your email, present it through their online email reader or via a program like MS Outlook.
These servers handle, sometimes tens of millions of emails a day, an estimated 70% of which are spam. To protect themselves from this flood of crud and spare you from having an inbox full of junk, they have implemented spam filters. One that is almost universally used is an open-source filter program called SpamAsassin although there are many more both software and hardware filters which may be used as well. (All our newsletters are spam checked through SpamAssassin's online tool and regularly score 95% or 100% non spam which is excellent.)
Email delivery services that handle sending out our email plus all the email servers are hyper-vigilant about email complaints (marked as JUNK) emails. If you have just 3 complaints on your mailing out of hundreds of emails, you probably will find your mailing stopped in it's tracks and nothing from you will get delivered. We occasionally have the problem but have established channels to unblock the mailings but you see how serious this issue is.
These attempt to identify spam by a set of rules, algorithms and reference databases (blacklists) of spammers and things about and in the email that are indicative of spam. Even legitimate email you want gets caught in these filters since they are simply scoring systems that add penalty points for each spam-like feature they find. Some things they find are heavily penalized and guarantee your email will hit the spam bucket or be discarded altogether.
Spoofed emails, email coming from known spam IP addresses and domains, dirty tricks played in spoofing and hiding code in the email or URLs are all ones we'd all agree should be canned.
Unfortunately, even some very innocuous words and phrases or things you think are OK practices also get penalized because some spam weasel used these in "spammy" emails. Words like "Click Here", "Free", "Financial Independence" anywhere in your email can cause it to accumulate penalty points.
What We Do
First of all, we use consultants to work with us to monitor and help keep our email process compliant and free of the structural defects that the spam filters hate. We also provide all sorts of validation and verification information, opt out notices, etc., that the filters look for to help decide if we are legitimate.
Before we send out a newsletter, we run it through two spam filters and test the newsletter in a test mailing to be sure we are scoring as high as possible on SpamAsassin. We often have perfect scores and work on our words and our processes to keep it that way. All this helps ensure deliverable from our end.
BUT.... You Have To Do Your Part Too
ISP's monitor open rates, bounce rates and reject codes that are sent back when an email goes to an user on their system. One of the killers are high bounce rates (shows your list is likely a purchased list that isn't permissible or otherwise should not be mailed.) High is anything over 2-3% max. Lesson here is don't email people who are likely not to be interested or bad email addresses. Avoid people who don't read anything, if they don't care, neither should you so don't add them to your list.
SPAM COMPLAINTS
Spam complaints will kill our reputation too. When you mark an email Spam in email, the ISP's notice. Some people are chronic complainers and will mark even email they requested to get as spam. That's why these are purged in our loads as well.
What You Can Do to Help
You can do all of us a favor if you pre-email your list from your own personal email client like Outlook. Tell them to be on the lookout for your opt-in message and to be sure and white list the sender when they get it if it ends up in spam. Have them mark it as not spam and to never block sender.
If you collect cards from people you meet at business meetings, do two things: One, tell them you will be sending them an email to subscribe to your newsletter. Two, load them into your email list THAT SAME DAY so they get the opt-in message while they still remember you.
If you have not been in touch with people on your list for over 6 months, send them a personal email asking them if they would like you to send over an invitation to subscribe to your newsletter. If they say "OK" then add them to your list.
Never ever load a list of people you haven't met or who don't expect to get emailed... that's a recipe for disaster. Do it once, we'll tell you, do it again and we have no choice but to block your account until we untangle the problem with you. It's for the good of all.
DO NOT ADD LINKEDIN 'FOLLOWERS' as these people are frequent complainers. As few as 3 of complaints from one mailing will have the sending process blocked for everyone. Don't do it. If you wish to email them yourself from your desktop with a personal invitation to subscribe to your newsletter. The safest way to do that is to simply send the people the Subscribe URL you get from your newsletter by right clicking the “Subscribe” icon next to the social icons. Copy the icon and paste it in the email you send with the hyperlink attached to it. That will let them subscribe and remove any doubt they want it.
WHY ARE COMPLAINTS AND EXCESSIVE BOUNCES SO BIG AN ISSUE?
ISP's generally cannot be contacted about situations where mistakes were made or problems. They don't want to deal with the issue that way. So, if your list ends up on a blacklist, there are about 30 of them out there, trying to get off it will make talking to an IRS Auditor seem like a pleasant experience. Generally, all we can do is post our problem on message forums and hope someone from the ISP is watching and will decide to intercede.
Eventually, the block will go away but it is totally up to each ISP and blacklist as to how and when this will happen.
The moral of this tale is to DON'T DO SPAMMY, AVOIDABLE THINGS THAT CAUSE PROBLEMS!